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So, you built your shoebox-sized satellite. You found a spot on a rocket and got it to the International Space Station, where astronauts then released it into Earth’s orbit. Now you need to communicate with it. How?

The answer has been a headache for space startups, which, like any small company, don’t necessarily have the resources to build a huge amount of communications infrastructure from scratch. Some go ahead and do it. Others, like Southern Stars, find a partner with existing resources.

Spaceflight, which has been booking space for small satellites on rockets since early 2013, believes there is room for another option: a global network for communicating with satellites that anyone can buy time on, bringing down the cost for big and small satellite companies.

“Just as computers used to be mainframes and then it was the PC and now it’s tablets and smartphones with billions of different nodes…

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A radical redrawing of a firm’s technology road map can enable an IT department to be more focused on strategic applications and development and to work more closely with non-IT departments and business units.

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Speaker David Epstein created a truly stellar slide deck for his talk at TED2014. When your slides rock, your whole presentation pops to life. Here, advice from our office slide master on making Keynote and Powerpoint presentations that communicate strongly. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Aaron Weyenberg is the master of slide decks. Our UX Lead creates Keynote presentations that are both slick and charming—the kind that pull you in and keep you captivated, but in an understated way that makes you actually focus on what’s being said out loud. He does this for his own presentations and for lots of other folks in the office. Yes, people ask him to design their slides because he’s just that good at them.

We asked Aaron to bottle his Keynote mojo so that others could benefit from it. Here, find some of his tips for making an effective slidedeck, split into two parts:…

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As Google’s (s goog) connected car and driverless vehicle ambitions increase, it needed to find a car guy to advise it on the rather arcane and insular ways of the automotive industry. Well, Google got its gearhead.

Former Ford Motor Company(s f) CEO and President Alan Mulally has joined Google board of directors and will serve on Google’s audit committee, Google revealed in its blog today. Google didn’t say specifically that Mulally would advise the company on automotive matters, but you have to figure that Mulally’s eight years at the helm of one the world’s most storied automakers — one which he managed to save from bankruptcy — has got to have something to do with the decision.

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Bitcoin merchant adoption is fast becoming a neck-and-neck race between Coinbase and BitPay, two companies who both offer similar services as a payment processor for merchants. Expedia and Dish Network both use Coinbase, while TigerDirect and Virgin Galactic are partners with BitPay. Shopify used to be squarely in BitPay’s corner, but today it announced that the more than 100,000 businesses on the ecommerce platform can now choose Coinbase to be their payment provider as well.

“We’re not supporting one provider over the other. We want to make sure merchants have the choice because each one has their features and benefits. And we’re just happy to offer that level of choice,” said Louis Kearns, director of payments at Shopify, in a phone interview.

Shopify was early to hop on the bitcoin bandwagon when it teamed up with BitPay in November 2013. Kearns said “thousands” of businesses use BitPay already and it…

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Europe’s top banking regulator may think banks should stay away from bitcoin and other virtual currencies, but that’s good news for at least one company — Elliptic, which has just scored $2 million in seed funding from Octopus Investments and several angels.

Elliptic offers a secure, insured bitcoin service called Elliptic Vault for retailers, hedge funds, bitcoin exchanges and other companies that are trying to dabble in this new world of so-called cryptocurrencies. According to CEO James Smith, the advice of the European Banking Regulator “opens up the playing field for people like us who can step into that void.”

Smith said the funding would be used to make Elliptic Vault easier to use:

“We want to make it very easy for companies to use. If they’re used to other types of financial products… a hedge fund is used to having everything with a custodian, normally a bank…